The research project examined the expectations associated with artistic practices as regards to the potential of the arts as a driver for social transformation. It was also interested in how such artistic interventions are perceived by different audiences. These practices are typically seen as located in-between art as political expression (e.g. theater and activist art) and artistic strategies in politics (e.g. activism and protest). The assumption was that in these social fields, different logics of artistic practice (the “poetics of intervention”) take effect and interlace. Another assumption was that expectations regarding the impact of artistic intervention are central to artistic self-understanding. The research focused on three key areas. First, ethnographic methods were used to investigate the production of selected, event-based interventions of various art forms. Second, the reception and interpretation of these interventions by different audiences were examined. Finally, an empirically informed, theoretical contribution to a field-theoretical understanding of artistic intervention was made.